Jetpack 3.9.5 was released yesterday with compatibilities for the upcoming WordPress 4.5 release and a handful of enhancements/bug fixes. Shortly after issuing the routine maintenance update, the Jetpack team began receiving reports of random, unwanted videos being added to the comments of posts. Any number string in the comments was automatically converted into a Vimeo…
WordPress.org is second only to WordPress.com in Google search results for “WordPress,” followed by the project’s download, about, and featured themes pages. Unfortunately, visitors to WordPress.org land on an outdated website that doesn’t accurately represent the vibrance of the WordPress project and its strong community. As the face of the open source project, WordPress.org is…
A Day of REST, the first conference dedicated to the WordPress REST API, was held in London at the end of January 2016, hosted by the events team at Human Made. Attendees offered overwhelmingly positive feedback after the conference finished, with 81% of the 221 participants saying they would attend again. The event’s organizers announced…
Latte is a new parallax style WordPress portfolio theme created by Hardeep Asrani. The 19-year old developer from India already has 17 plugins and four themes to his credit on WordPress.org. We recently featured his work on the Advanced CSS Editor plugin, which allows users to write CSS in the customizer. Latte follows suit with…
The official plugin directory is arguably the best place to host a plugin if you’re looking for the widest distribution, but it’s also one of the most inhospitable for developers. A current meta team initiative is focused on improving search, including prioritizing translated plugins for international users, and streamlining plugin submission, among other improvements. This…
The 31st Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference was held in San Diego, California, last week. Every year thousands of attendees gather to share knowledge and best practices for technology that removes barriers for people with disabilities. This year Rian Rietveld was recognized by Knowbility.org for her accessibility contributions to WordPress core. She…
Modern Tribe, a top digital agency with a collection of popular plugins on WordPress.org, announced that it has acquired GigPress. With 20,000+ active installs and more than 260,000 downloads, GigPress is one of the most widely used plugins for musicians and performers who want to manage events with WordPress. Despite the plugin’s solid placement in…
If you’re a developer, you may take for granted how easy it is for you to create a child theme for storing customizations separate from the parent theme. This one seemingly simple task can pose a significant hurdle for your average WordPress user. Without understanding the best practice of creating a child theme, users resort…
Ed Finkler is on a mission to raise mental health awareness in the tech community with his Open Source Mental Illness (OSMI) campaign. In 2013 Finkler started speaking at conferences and gathering information on mental health in the tech workplace. His goal is to provide resources and documentation that companies can use to create more…
As the WordPress customizer becomes more widely adopted by theme and plugin developers, users often have a host of live preview options to play with when personalizing their sites. Different combinations can produce wildly different designs. What if you could save a preview of customizations before going live with it? This is the idea behind…
WordPress 4.5 is right around the corner with the first release candidate now available for download. It includes 49 changes from the last beta – improvements to the new custom logo feature, a minor update to jQuery, updates to inline documentation, and fixes for various small bugs. The upcoming release is packed full of improvements…
Spam is one of the most discouraging things about managing a BuddyPress-powered social network. Since WordPress itself is already a magnet for spam signups and comments, BuddyPress is subject to the same and then some. With an ordinary WordPress site you can block most of it fairly well, but with BuddyPress you often have to…
Last month GitHub introduced issue and pull request templates in response to the “Dear GitHub” letter of complaints from open source project maintainers. The new templates let maintainers streamline contributions to be more structured and meaningful for the project. Creating issue and pull request templates could be a boring addition to your project’s task list,…
Getting a theme approved for the WordPress directory can sometimes take months, depending on the number of corrections required and reviewers available to handle the queue. As part of a larger plan to make things more efficient, the WordPress Theme Review Team is making progress towards automating many of the time-consuming checks involved in reviewing…
When Matt Mullenweg asked the audience who has used Git and/or GitHub during his 2014 State of the Word address, the response was almost unanimous. “Whoah, that’s all the hands!” he exclaimed before announcing that core contributors will soon be able to submit pull requests on GitHub. Two years later, an official patch workflow has…